The A-Z of Programming Languages: Perl

Did you know that Perl creator Larry Wall thinks the community ‘paints a little picture in heaven’? In a lengthy interview about the history of Perl, Wall talks about the evolving nature of programming languages, especially Perl, and in the future a lot of people will be getting into programming as a profession, but not calling it programming. Wall’s genius is expressed in his desire to not recognise Perl in 20 years, instead to design the ability to create things we will need in 20 or 100 years. And, yes, Wall picked the Camel mascot as it is ‘an animal that is self-sufficient in a dry place’.

Yeah, not that I’m any sort of expert in programmming but I get a general feeling that Perl 6 may try a bit too much, like being as flexible as LISP so that it allows one to develop different Perl6 dialects etc. Interesting anyway, and maybe they reach at least some of those goals, someday, some year, some decade from now?